


undertow

by MissjuliaMiriam



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Battle of Naboo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 11:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14893491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissjuliaMiriam/pseuds/MissjuliaMiriam
Summary: Obi-Wan struggles, one way or another, under the weight of loss.(Takes place directly after Qui-Gon's death.)





	undertow

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [And I Can't Save What's Left Of You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14896446) by [ArvenaPeredhel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArvenaPeredhel/pseuds/ArvenaPeredhel). 



> Thanks to the folks in the SW Discord I joined for encouraging this.
> 
> I'm sorry?

Obi-Wan strokes his master’s face with clean fingertips and wishes perversely that they were bloody. Seeing the stain on his hands might impress the weight of it upon him better. He might then feel it. But he feels nothing.

It’s wrong to say that bodies go cold: rather, they lose warmth, and instead become the temperature of the room. Obi-Wan does not feel his master’s warmth against him any more, nor cold. All feeling has bled away. So has all movement. Even in the Force there is stillness as there has not been for many days. The roil that they have been living in, that has been abrading his senses constantly for most of a week, has ended. Everything is peaceful now, and silent and calm as death.

He closes his eyes. Qui-Gon’s, too, are closed; he had done that almost first, because he could not bear the blank gaze. It was heavier than any look of censure or disappointment or frustration that his master had ever laid upon him before. Qui-Gon’s weight in his lap, however, feels like nothing. A sack of grain; a roll of fine fabric. Nothing more. Nothing less. Only the faint burden of a body’s component parts, which every sentient must in some way bear every day, even if only in the heaviness of limbs after long work.

Obi-Wan is very tired. He wishes that he could lay his head on his master’s chest as he has done before and sleep. Let the blackness bear away the acrid scent of plasma burns and the melting pit far below, and the sound of the still-cycling ray shields, and the coarseness of Qui-Gon Jinn’s tangled hair beneath his hands. He wants everything to simply stop and be carried away on the misty tide of dreaming, for he knows that now that the disturbance in the Force that has disturbed his sleep these past night is gone, he will be able to dream peacefully.

Or maybe he will dream of red light piercing through, and his master’s soft gasp. Of the shape of his body strewn upon the ground like garbage, though at least in one piece: he feels an obscure gratitude that the Sith had not tried to taunt Obi-Wan through the shield by mutilating his master’s body while Obi-Wan was helpless to stop him.

 _His master’s body_. Qui-Gon Jinn is dead. His warm green vitality is gone. The roots of their bond have been ripped up from Obi-Wan’s mind. There is no blood on the floor of the room, for a lightsaber cauterizes even as it cuts, but he feels that something within him is torn and bleeding.

And Qui-Gon Jinn is dead. Rigor will set in soon, and Obi-Wan will be forced to break his master’s bones to maneuver him from the melting pit’s chamber. Suddenly, desperately, he wants to be gone from this place.

“I won’t leave you,” he promises his master in a whisper, and gathers the limp form in his arms to carry him as he himself has been carried.

When he tries to stand, to lift, his arms shake and his knees will not straighten and his back remains curled over his master’s body. Every bit of his strength has been taken by the battle. He can’t. He considers briefly dragging him, but he has no cloak to use as a sledge and refuses to drag him by his wrists or ankles like a recalcitrant prisoner or like worthless trash. He tries again, this time to sling Qui-Gon over his shoulders in a carry as he has been taught, but again he goes not have the strength to stand under the weight. Crouched there with his master’s chest pressed against his shoulderblades, his arms draped past one shoulder, a single wretched sob tears at Obi-Wan’s throat. There is nothing left of him to do this one final task for his master, and though he has failed many times, it has never felt like this.

His connection to the Force feels strung out and weak, the same as every inch of his body, but he pulls on it and doesn’t care if it breaks; if this is the last thing he ever does with the Force, if this effort breaks his mind or his spirit or his body, so be it. His resolve will have to be enough. And it is: enough for a trickle of energy through spent limbs and a spent heart. He stands on trembling legs and leans over enough to heave Qui-Gon up onto his back, halfway to a piggy-back carry. Qui-Gon though has no strength to wrap his legs around Obi-Wan’s waist, and so Obi-Wan must drag them, trailing. The first step feels as though he is carrying the weight of the whole sky upon his shoulders, but he bears up under it and takes another. Then another. Each step takes an small eon; the distance from where Qui-Gon lay to that last fateful shield is endless.

Obi-Wan can only pass one shield at a time as they cycle, for he cannot muster enough speed to make it through more than one. Not without risking Qui-Gon’s feet, and he refuses to do that. By the time he is through that gauntlet he wonders if enough time has passed that someone has come looking for them. Surely, he thinks. And if they have not been found by now, more likely no one is coming.

Maybe the silence of the Force truly _is_ the silence of death. He does not know the fate of those fighting above. He hurts too much to stretch his senses to try to find Anakin’s shining light, and even if he could he thinks it would scald him to touch it now. If he found nothing, despair truly would take him, for his promise then would be for nothing and he would have nothing at all. He doesn’t look. Just this once, he allows himself not to know until this first trial is ended.

 _I am still a Padawan_ , Obi-Wan thinks as he takes one step at a time across the narrow catwalks which he fought his way along a small eternity ago. _These are my Trials_.

He wonders if he is failing in doing this, for he is giving everything he is to cling to the one thing (a thing now, no longer a person) to which he is attached. Or if he is succeeding instead, for some unknowable virtue.

_(Devotion. Perseverance. Suffering.)_

One step at a time. Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.

“Gods!” someone shouts, shocked. “Young Master--Gods and Hells, someone get a medic!”

Obi-Wan looks up and realizes that he has passed through the gates into the hangar. Fighters are landed around him, more haphazardly than they had been when he had thrown down his cloak and drawn his blade in this room. A pilot is staring at him; another is the person shouting. Calling for aid.

He opens his mouth and no words pass his lips. He cannot tell them that it’s too late. Far, far too late.

“Come, young Master Jedi, let go now, let go,” someone is saying. A tug on his burden; he clings tighter. He cannot leave him. Cannot drop him, for if he does he will never have the strength to pick him up again. If he stops he will not start again. If he lets go, it will be over.

“It’s over,” the same voice says. “Easy now. Master Jedi, please.”

 _I’m still a Padawan,_ Obi-Wan thinks. Finally a hand that is trying to be gentle forces his own away from Qui-Gon’s body. His knuckles ache from the long strain, but it’s only one more small agony on top of the rest.

“Are you alright?” says another pilot, who comes to lay his hands on Obi-Wan’s shoulders, peering into his face.

Obi-Wan does not know how to explain to them that the rage that he felt is gone. The grief is lurking, waiting for him to let down his defences so that it might run him through. The pain, of course, is constant, so all-consuming that he does not know what hurts: his mind or body or heart or soul. All of the above.

“It’ll be okay, lad,” says the pilot behind him. Perhaps the one who even now is taking Qui-Gon away. He hears the sound of his master’s body being laid once more upon the cold ground. Not the soft earth, but worked metal, something with which Qui-Gon had always been on some level uncomfortable. “The battle’s won.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, finally. He has just enough voice for that, and to say, “Good.”

Then he loses the battle after all, and does not hear the alarmed cries of the pilots as he topples to the ground beside his master.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are welcome as always. "You're a monster!" is a perfectly acceptable comment, for the record.


End file.
